Sherlock Holmes: More brawn than brains

Another day, another reboot. This time around it's the erstwhile detective from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novels that gets the Hollywood retreatment.

The game's afoot as the brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes and his faithful sidekick Dr. John Watson tackle another mystery. The nefarious Lord Blackwood has apparently risen from the grave after he was hung. He intends to create a new world order in which he and his evil group will rule. Can Holmes and Watson stop their seemingly supernatural adversary?

While this reimaging of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson might be missing the usual verbal hyperboles such as "elementary my dear Watson," the fashionable deerstalker hat that became a costume trademark of Holmes during the Basil Rathbone films of the 1940's and a plausible mystery which an audience had a chance in hell of figuring out, it did feature a number of good things. Robert Downey Jr. excelled in the title role, creating his own unique take on the classic detective. He was a scatter-brained sleuth who could cleverly deduce the evil plans of a villain before thoroughly kicking his butt and describing how he was going to do so in detailed fashion via internal monologue and oh so cool looking slo-mo shots (the boxing match in the middle of the film is a prime example of this). His interaction and chemistry with Jude Law (as a tougher than nails Watson) gave the film a much needed emotional backbone. Director Guy Ritchie infused Sherlock Holmes with his signature visual style of quick cuts, slick editing and fight sequences which were extremely intense. For all of its imagistic bluster however, it felt as though he sacrificed too much of the story and Holmes' intellectual persona, a persona that audiences are accustomed to seeing from the Holmes character, in favor of more brawls, scraps and explosios. Lord Blackwood's evil plan for world domination seemed to have gotten lost between the fisticuffs and the subplot of Watson's plans to walk away from the mystery solving gig in order to wed his lady in waiting Mary (and Holmes many attempts to stop Watson from leaving). There was so much going on and so many holes in the plot that when the audience got to the climax of the film, they might not have been entirely sure just what Blackwood was trying to do or how Holmes was going to be able to stop him.

Sherlock Holmes might have been more brutish than brainy, but it was still a lot of fun to watch.

Grade: B-

Red Eye: As if you needed another reason to fear flying!

A good cinematic thrill ride is hard to find these days. Either the thrills don't jump up and grab you like you are hoping for or you find yourself shaking your head as a plot twist so unexpected comes along that you cannot help but feel ripped off. Red Eye is not one of those movies, it's a film that actually delivers the goods and gives you the white knuckle experience.

While waiting to catch a flight back to Miami, Lisa Reisert meets Jackson Rippner. They share a drink and some conversation before boarding the same flight and eventually find themselves seated together. But once they are in the air Jackson reveals the true reason he seems to keep meeting up with Lisa. Unless she helps him in his attempt to assassinate the Head of Homeland Security, her father will be killed.

Although it started off looking like it would be another disposable romantic comedy, Red Eye quickly turned into one hell of an intense thriller. It dispensed with all of the unnecessary cinematic fat found in most Hollywood films and concentrated on keeping its plot, story and character development economical and yet so rich that by the end the audience felt like it had just watched an epic. Uber horror director Wes Craven did his best Hitchcock impersonation by first playing with the audience, making them believe Jackson’s good intentions, and then cramming them into that claustrophobic cabin where Lisa had nowhere to go and no one to call for help. In a movie that relied heavily upon two actors to carry the story and the action (and make sitting in a plane for a quarter of the film seem interesting) Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy delivered with performances that kept the audience engaged . McAdams as the strong Lisa, a woman who refused to be a victim again, brought depth and power to a role that could have been overshadow by that of Murphy, who conveyed the kind of cool hostility which made it hard to root against him. He was never over-the-top in his villainy, rather he subtly exuded evil via looks and gestures and that in and of itself was more chilling than anything most villians in other thrillers could do with guns and knives and a bunch of cheesy, throwaway one - liners.

Grade: B+